TERRAFORMING TERRA
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Saturday, August 20, 2011

Monsanto's GMO Trap

Folks have been complaining for
years, but the reality is now well established.Monsanto in particular has been able to play monopoly with industrial
agriculture to such an extent that operators right now are effectively unable
to wriggle free without a massive lossing investment.

This monopoly has been set up by
the usual methods with particular attention been paid to locking down a
regulatory regime that blatantly favors Monsanto in quite the same way Pharma
has gamed the medical supply business.These are all regulatory monopolies that serve only the monopoly and the
consumer is powerless price taker.

Shouting that this is wrong from
the roof tops is not going to work too well either.The real answer must come with the advent of
truly modern community friendly neo organic farming that emerges beside the industrial
farms and starts by simply not competing directly on the same crops.

I already know how to organize it
and do it and that will be the real future of agriculture.This nonsense is going to run into a vicious
wall of diminishing returns as available operators retire and are simply not
replaced while margins continue to be squeezed by Mother Nature until
breakdowns run amok.

Farmers speak out: GMOs are a trap that Monsanto is using to take over
agriculture

(NaturalNews) Most Americans have no idea just how pervasive
genetically-modified organisms (GMO) have become throughout the food supply.
Predatory marketing practices have lured many farmers into converting over to
GMOs, and craftily-designed, proprietary growing systems have kept them there.
Meanwhile, multinational biotechnology companies like Monsanto effectively
seize the reigns of agriculture and dictate how it will proceed from here.

In the short, but highly informative, documentary Farmer to Farmer: The
Truth About GM Crops, family farmer Michael Hart
interviews a number of farmers in
the US about their experiences growing GM crops. He also asks them
whether or not they would recommend GM crop systems to other farmers,
particularly those in the UK
and Europe that are currently being pushed to
adopt them.

Hart discovers, of course, that GM crops are not all that Monsanto toots them to
be. Besides failing to improve crop yields, GM crops
require increasingly more pesticide and herbicide applications
in order to remain viable. And out of control "superweeds;"
escalating prices for seeds, pesticides, and
herbicides; and the non-reality of coexistence between GM and non-GM crops are among the many
additional problems farmers are facing -- and unfortunately, viable solutions
to these problems are largely non-existent.

Monsanto's goal is to convert everybody to Roundup Ready crops,
buy out all the seed companies, and control the agriculture market

We frequently cover the topic of GMOs here at NaturalNews --
exposing both the schemes employed to implement them around the world and the
political gerrymandering taking place in nations like the US and Canada that
keeps them unlabeled and ensures they maintain a strong and ever-increasing
foothold in agriculture. And Monsanto's endgame, of course, is to control the
entirety of agriculture.

Monsanto's strategy with GMOs is a long-term one, and one that has crept in
largely unaware throughout the years. According to the latest figures,
Monsanto's GM crops now blanket over 330 million US acres. Ninety-three percent of soybeans grown in the
US are GM, and 77 percent of soybeans worldwide are GM. Most UScorn, cotton, and canola is
also GM (http://www.gmo-compass.org/eng/agri...).

So how did things get this way? In the early 1990s when GMOs were first being
introduced in the US, Monsanto and others convinced farmers to adopt them by
promising that crop yields would increase, that less pesticides and herbicides
would be needed to grow them, and that overall costs to farmers would
ultimately decrease. More than a decade later, farmers are now revealing that
all of this was a lie.

"The first few years it'll be cheap and economical," said Joe (a
farmer who wished to remain anonymous for his own protection) to Hart
concerning farmers switching to GM crop systems. "Once everybody is
switched to it, you'll lose your choices, you'll no longer have a choice to
raise conventional products ... and you'll get yourself into a trap where
you're paying royalty fees to companies that own
traits and chemicals,
and they'll continue to raise those fees every year."

And this is precisely the case with every farmer interviewed in Farmer to
Farmer. Adopting GMOs seemed to make sense in the beginning. But after a
critical mass of farmers made the switch, Monsanto began to raise prices for seed and
pesticides, to buy up seed companies, and even to control GM farmers' ability
to mix their own chemicals and save their own non-GM seeds -- and the end
result was a widespread loss of agricultural freedom among American farmers.

Monsanto has made it virtually impossible for GM farmers to switch back
to non-GM crops

So why don't farmers who recognize the failure of GM crops simply
switch back to non-GM crops? The complex system Monsanto has built makes doing
so a near impossibility.

Between buying up seed companies
and making non-GM seeds difficult to obtain, and cornering the market on
pesticides and herbicides and the research that goes into them, most farmers
simply have no choice but to continue planting GM crops. And when their non-GM
crops become contaminated with GM traits, any non-GM endeavors are ruined.

"The last years that I was growing conventional soybeans ... our beans kept becoming more
and more contaminated," said Rodney Nelson, a GM sugar beet and soybean
grower from North Dakota,
concerning his efforts to grow non-GM soybeans. "It was getting down to
the point where about 50 percent of our loads were being rejected because of contamination, and we
couldn't buy seed that was pure without contamination."

"On top of that, the conventional seed no longer was cheap. The seed
companies (many of which are now owned by Monsanto or other Big Ag companies,
as NaturalNews recently reported) ... simply hiked the price on their
conventional seed, and then when they sold you the seed, it came with a clause
the even though its conventional, it's not patented, you couldn't save and
replant it ... we didn't have any choice but to go back and start planting Roundup Ready crops.
There was no choice, that was the only choice."

Apart from switching to organic,
which would take many years of preparation just to get the fields up to organic
standards, most GM farmers today have no choice but to continue growing GM
crops. As long as the US
government continues to provide patent protection for
GM crops, as well as allow monopoly control over the seed market by biotechnology companies,
many American farmers will simply have to remain in the clutches of Monsanto to
stay afloat.

Be sure to check out the entire Farmer to Farmer documentary to learn
the dirty truth behind GM crops, and why it is absolutely vital to do
everything possible to eliminate patent protection for living organisms and to
end corporate control over the food supply:

Who is this Monsanto, and where do I find him?

Hungary Destroys All Monsanto GMO Maize Fields

In an effort to rid the country of Monsanto's GMO products, Hungary has stepped up the pace. This looks like its going to be another slap in the face for Monsanto. A new regulation was introduced this March which stipulates that seeds are supposed to be checked for GMO before they are introduced to the market. Unfortunately, some GMO seeds made it to the farmers without them knowing it.

Almost 1000 acres of maize found to have been grown with genetically modified seeds have been destroyed throughout Hungary deputy state secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development Lajos Bognar said. The GMO maize has been ploughed under, said Lajos Bognar, but pollen has not spread from the maize, he added.

Unlike several EU members, GMO seeds are banned in Hungary. The checks will continue despite the fact that seed traders are obliged to make sure that their products are GMO free, Bognar said.

During their investigation, controllers have found Pioneer and Monsanto products among the seeds planted.

The free movement of goods within the EU means that authorities will not investigate how the seeds arrived in Hungary but they will check where the goods can be found, Bognar said. Regional public radio reported that the two biggest international seed producing companies are affected in the matter and GMO seeds could have been sown on up to thousands of hectares in the country.

Most of the local farmers have complained since they just discovered they were using GMO seeds. With season already under way, it is too late to sow new seeds, so this years harvest has been lost.

And to make things even worse for the farmers, the company that distributed the seeds in Baranya county is under liquidation. Therefore, if any compensation is paid by the international seed producers, the money will be paid primarily to that company's creditors, rather than the farmers. {Via}

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